BLURBS ABOUT BOOKS

“Whatever book you are looking for, the shopkeepers in this area will have it and best of all, their pricing is fair and sometimes a bargain. Many of the shopkeepers speak English and all of them know who has what and where to get several versions of the genre you are interested in. I started reading Turkish a few years ago and this is where I bought my children’s books in Turkish to read. If you are a book aficionado, you will LOVE this market.”

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This is our local mobile library. Its aim is to reach distant areas in the town and spread the magic of reading among children of Jewish and Arab ethnicity, in a literary coexistence. It travels the town, stops and camps out in the open air with book shelves, carts, bean bags, matts, and other cultural activities – what a delight, just read!

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I have already spoke my mind about ebooks and technology when it came to reading in general and books in particular. In short, I simply detested every digital form of reading, and books especially. But when I came across this man’s story, it touched my heart so deeply that it made me change my one-sided outlook on the matter. I’d like to share it with you.

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Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Equilibrium is my favorite movie of all times. This is shortly what it’s about:

In a futuristic world, a strict regime has eliminated war by suppressing emotions: books, art and music are strictly forbidden and feeling is a crime punishable by death. Cleric John Preston (Bale) is a top ranking government agent responsible for destroying those who resist the rules. When he misses a dose of Prozium, a mind-altering drug that hinders emotion, Preston, who has been trained to enforce the strict laws of the new regime, suddenly becomes the only person capable of overthrowing it.

Before Cleric Preston stops taking Prozium, he kills his partner and best friend, Cleric Partridge, whom he caught in the act of reading and enjoying Yeats. Partridge provoked Preston to kill him, because he was caught performing a Sense Offense – the punishment of which is being burnt alive. Cleric Partridge has stopped taking the doze for a while, and his suffering was well perceived as he watched the death of innocent people, guilty of feeling, and incineration of works of art like the Mona-Liza. Partridge was willing to die for Yeats’s words and the ideas they represented. How magnificent!

Imagine living in a world without books, without poetry, without literature, without art, without music, without feelings. Like zombies, like robots and machines. What’s the point of your existence then? It doesn’t matter how many problems come my way, and how crappy I feel sometimes, I always feel better just by knowing that I can read an awesome book, wonder at an elaborate work of art and indulge in a fantastic pleasure of a musical piece.

Book collecting is the collecting of books, including seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloging, displaying, storing, and maintaining whatever books are of interest to a given individual collector. The love of books is bibliophilia, and someone who loves to read, admire, and collect books is a bibliophile.

Nowadays you can easily read online free ebooks with an iPad, iPhone, computer, ebook reader, loan from the library or from a friend. So why still bother and buy books at all? There are many reasons why people buy and collect things in general, and books in particular. Here”s an expert’s opinion that I appreciate:

WHY COLLECT BOOKS NOW?

Why collect books now, when I just got an iPad?

We are clearly emerging from what will be seen as a Golden Age of Publishing and book production, both in the UK and the United States, which has been booming for the last sixty years but now seems to be changing, like the music industry. With the advent of the Kindle, the iPad etc., it is inevitable that much of traditional book publishing is starting to shift to downloadable formats, away from paper and printer\’s ink. If this is true, I think that now is the time, for those of us who care about books, to start to make a collection of the ones we love, precisely because it looks like there is going to be less of them, in the future.

Real books vs. e-books? Hardback vs. paperback?

Real books are fascinating to handle and decorative to display in a way that a small, flat screen can never be. Most hardcover books, if printed on acid-free paper and kept away from damp, last astonishingly well, over many decades. (Paperbacks are much more of a problem for collectors, as the lesser paper quality usually means they yellow with time, and their glued bindings will eventually crack and split down the spine.) Each book becomes a time capsule for the year it was produced, summing up a design aesthetic, in addition to the actual words.

This is why I buy, collect, store and maintain books for a few years now:

ebooks. The sole though of a cold, irritating modern projected light of a screen, interrupted by black pixels that represent letters makes my mind ache. I absolutely and utterly detest it. Working all day with a computer screen, 5 days a week is much more than enough. Consequently, all ebooks available in the world – are worthless to me.

Loaning books from a library seems like the best idea. It’s economical, you have a great variety and you save storage space. The only thing is that it’s actually a bad idea that causes me great inconvenience. You get a book from the library, put it on your cabinet, it waits patiently for some attention but you have no time to reach it during the week. By the time you finally decide to pick it up and read, you have to give it back, or else… If I wasn’t working, that would’ve been great. In a previous blurb I described how being a teenager I craved to own the books I liked. And I do own every single one of them now. It’s like owning a part of the world, a time-capsule of ideas.

Loaning to or from a friend. This is a whole issue. Let’s just put it this way – NEVER! Never will I loan from a friend or loan to a friend. The few times it happened, books just disappeared. Like ghosts. Books are precious to me and I don’t loan any precious things to nobody.

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There is nothing like reading an actual hard copy, well-written old book. I love ebooks for air travel and other situations, but still love the tactile experience of turning well-worn pages. The look, feel and even the subtle fragrance of “real” books is satisfying and nostalgic.

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With a population of 65,000,000, if WordPress were a country, it would be the 22nd largest in the world, wedged right between the United Kingdom (63,700,000) and France (65,700,000). It is a fascinating, international community, that enables all to build a platform to showcase their talents and/or to have a voice. I enjoy my trips around the WordPress world. The sites, sounds, stories, rants and raves I encounter from my desktop our priceless.